Weehawken author Lori Majewski to discuss the 'Mad World' of Eighties New Wave at Word Books Open Mic

Weehawken's Lori Majewski, co-author with Jonathan Bernstein of Mad World: An Oral History Of New Wave Artists And Songs That Defined The Eighties, will speak at a special Word Books open mic event on Saturday, May 17.Photo by Nick Barrata

How often have you been driving or ironing or making dinner, when suddenly a song on the radio stops you dead in your tracks and has you humming along?

“I Melt With You” or “Take On Me” or Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film?” Those songs – the New Wave hits of the Eighties – and the indelible mark they’ve left on our culture form the basis of Mad World: An Oral History Of New Wave Artists And Songs That Defined The Eighties, a colorful, enchanting, and fact-filled new tome by authors Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein.

Majewski, a lifelong Hudson County resident and onetime reporter at the Jersey Journal, will be on hand to discuss her work along with author Len Vlahos (“The Scar Boys”) and musician Chris Butler of the Waitresses on Saturday, May 17, at the inauguration of a new open mic series at Word Books in downtown Jersey City.

“I believe this is the first in a series at Word Bookstore of open mic nights, which should be a lot of fun,” Majewski said, speaking from her home in Weehawken. “ "I had done three or four book signings in the area already, so when I heard about the open mic night, I thought it would be nice to combine resources and talk a little about the book but also get to be a part of this new event.”

“It’s hosted by Len Vlahos, who’s kind of a bigwig in the publishing world,” Majewski noted. “He recently published a young-adult novel called The Scar Boys that was very well received, kind of like a “Stand By Me” for today. It’s one of those stories that can be enjoyed by all ages even though it’s marketed for young adults. What’s cool is that the title of every chapter is a song title, and it’s a lot of the same songs that we wrote about in our book.”

“And then we’ll also have Chris Butler, who lives in Jersey City now,” Majewski added, “which works out perfectly because his band the Waitresses is in my book too So it’ll be a combo night, and we’ll all give our own take on the New Wave era. And then since it’s an open mic, anyone there can sign up and sign a song or tell a story too.”

The Waitresses, who originally hailed from Ohio before relocating to New York City, are one of several American groups in Mad World, along with Devo and Berlin. But most of the book is devoted to the U.K. bands who were swept up in both the music of New Wave and the birth of MTV, and Majewski argued that was not just a coincidence.

“It was definitely a very British-centric time in popular music,” Majewski explained. “This music was really born of two things: David Bowie and punk. Everybody wanted to be David Bowie, but no one really knew how to be as big and flamboyant and talented as Bowie. But then punk taught them that you only really needed to know three chords, that literally anybody could start a band. And with the proliferation of keyboards and synthesizers at the end of the 70’s, you didn’t even need to know how to play three chords. You could just play the synthesizer and make some sounds, and that’s what a lot of these bands did. And then MTV came along, and a lot of the really big American bands at the time simply didn’t have videos. So they had to look at the weird stuff happening across the Atlantic, and that’s how New Wave became so popular in the U.S.”

Mad World is not a traditional oral history, with hundreds of interviews divvied up into sound bytes and quotes and arranged to form a narrative. Instead, each band gets its own chapter, and the original members were simply allowed to talk about themselves, their motivations, and their memories.

So, for instance, you’ll learn that Gary Numan had no idea how to play an instrument when he wrote and recorded his hit single “Cars,” or that the original members of New Order – still one of the most influential acts in post-punk – barely spoke to another. In the chapter on the Waitresses, Chris Butler relates how he wrote a hit single – “I Know What Boys Like” – and leveraged it into a major-label contract before he even had a band assembled to play it.

“European bands were all about fashion and style, and doing whatever you felt like doing, and MTV fed on that,” Majewski stated. “Even some of the American bands like Berlin wanted people to think they were European. Devo really just started as this weird art project; you look at the video for ‘Whip It’ today and you can’t believe how out there it is. And the Waitresses were one of my writing partner Jonathan Bernstein’s favorite bands, he really wanted to have them in the book. Their story is so unusual that it’s a really nice chapter, it sticks out like a sort thumb in the best way.”

“The thing with a lot of these bands, and the reason the New Wave movement died out so quickly, is because they were literally all over the place,” Majewski explained. “They might make a rock record and follow it with a disco record followed by a funk record.”

“Acts today,” she argued, “do one thing. Katy Perry keeps making the same album over and over. Rihanna sound like Rihanna. And they all have stylists and songwriters and managers telling them how to look and what to sing. The bands in our book did it all by themselves. Adam Ant had a white stripe painted across his face because he wanted to paint a white stripe across his face; nobody told him to do it.”

Majewski even argued that growing up in Weehawken helped fuel her love for this era of music and these particular bands. “You have to remember that when cable TV was first being introduced, Weehawken was one of the first communities where it was rolled out,” she said. “So growing up here, when I was a teenager, I’d run home from school every day and turn on MTV.”

When I was in junior high, Duran Duran were at their peak, and Culture Club and all these bands were on all the time,” she continued. ”That is really the soundtrack of my life. Music means so much to teenagers of every generation, but we were the first generation to have pictures and video to go with the sound, and so it was exponentially bigger to us than it had been to our parents.”

The fact that New Wave was a product of the video era did have its cost, though. “People talk today about bands from the Eighties like the Replacements or Bruce Springsteen as if they were so much more real than the New Wave bands,” she said. “Again, these bands were inspire d by David Bowie, so the sound and vision were equally important to them. It was a much more friendly time for women in music, who didn’t have to twerk to get attention, and it was a breakthrough period for gays. Think how amazing it was for Boy George to be on TV. And then, right next to him was Annie Lennox, who also performed in drag. So it was a very important era for self-expression.”

Also, because so many new wave bands used synthesizers, their music has been called into question by history. “Think about it, the word synthesize means fake, so naturally a lot of these bands weren’t taken as seriously as they should have been,” Majewski said. “That’s really the point of our book, to let these artists talk about their music and why we remember these song so vividly 30 years later. The book chose to be an oral history, we really didn’t start out to make it that way. But once we realized we had all of these really revealing and passionate interviews, we wanted to allow the artists to tell their stories in their own words.”

“Yes, it was the video era, so we assume these bands wouldn’t have been popular if not for the videos and the way they looked,” Majewski added. “But that’s not true. The songs are what lasted all these years. The videos are a snapshot of that time, but the real reason we can’t get enough of the 80’s is because of the actual compositions. These are great songs, and songs are timeless, even if videos are of their time.”

Lori Majewski, Len Vlahos, and Chris Butler will discuss their work and host an open mic at Word Book (123 Newark Avenue, Jersey City) on Saturday, May 17. The event begins at 6:30 pm and is free to the public.